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NARRATOR: Since the dawn of the space age,

we have seen so much and travelled so far.

We've sent spacecraft to Venus and Mercury.

We've landed a rover on Mars.

We've flown past the moons of Jupiter and through the rings of Saturn.

We've even photographed the icy mountains on Pluto.

With our telescopes on the ground and in space,

we've discovered that we live in a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars...

..in a universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies.

But for all we've accomplished and all we've learned,

the most important star in our sky remains unexplored.

The Sun.

The sun makes all life on Earth possible.

But in certain circumstances,

it can also cause untold damage to our modern society.

That's why, right now in a mountaintop in Hawaii,

and in the clean rooms

of the applied physics laboratory near Washington DC,

scientists are rushing to complete two projects designed to probe

the deepest mysteries of the sun...

..and not a moment too soon.

Now more than ever, our future depends on understanding the sun.

KALIRAI: The sun is the heartbeat of the solar system and our world.

We see the sun rise and set every day.

For all life on Earth, it's the most

recognisable and constant object in the universe.

GILBERT: It warms our oceans, it creates weather patterns.

It also provides energy to plants,

which provide us with our food and oxygen.

The sun allows us to exist.

McINTOSH: The idea of the sun-Earth connection,

this transport of energy,

as much as that is a truly beautiful thing,

it's actually quite insidious.

It means that our civilisation

is at the whim of what that thing wants to do.

GRUNSFELD: It's a double-edged sword.

Even though we think of the sun

as this quiet, benign provider of warmth,

it's actually a very violent place.

The sun is enormous.

It's 99.9% of the mass of the solar system.

You could take more than a million Earths and fit them inside the sun.

In the extreme density and the pressure of the centre of the sun,

through a process known as nuclear fusion,

individual hydrogen atoms

combine to form helium and generate tremendous power.

And so the core of the sun is like a massive hydrogen bomb.

We've seen a hydrogen bomb on Earth.

(EXPLOSION)

Imagine billions of hydrogen bombs

going off every second for four billion years.

And that immense nuclear force inside the sun

is pushing hundreds of millions of tonnes of mass outward.

But gravity is countering that force and pulling everything inward.

These two forces are in a perfect state of balance.

Toppling that balance in any one direction

can cause catastrophic events on planet Earth.

Our civilisation, our society is at the whim of what that thing

wants to do, and if it decides to blow its top,

we'd be in a whole world of hurt.

And that's what happened in 1859.

ONSAGER: By the early 1800s,

the scientific understanding of electricity and magnetism

enabled new technologies like the telegraph.

And by 1858,

there were about 200,000km of telegraph wires

laid around the world, which enabled unprecedented communication

between the continents.

KASPER: On one particular morning in 1859,

British astronomer Carrington

was projecting an image of the sun onto a sheet of paper...

..and he actually saw a bright flash of white light.

He saw a white flash and went, "What's that?"

16, 20 hours later,

telegraph wires begin to flash and arc.

People pulled out the plugs,

but power was still coming out of them.

Telegraph wires from London to Bombay.

The Victorian internet got fried.

People didn't know what to do.

Batteries got charged up even though they were pulled out.

Compass needles went crazy.

The whole sky lit up at night with the northern lights.

Alaska and Canada are used to seeing

the Aurora Borealis, the northern lights.

What was it like in September 1859

when the people in Cuba looked up and saw the northern lights?

MOUNTAIN: In the southern part of the United States,

the Baltimore Advertiser reported,

"The light was greater than that of the moon when its full

when the quiet streets of the city presented a beautiful appearance."

Rather than being mystified, they should have been terrified.

Because we were seeing an event of an incredible power

of an energy we didn't in fact understand,

which became known as the Carrington event.

And if that happened today and we weren't prepared,

it would take out our GPS,

it would take out our internet and take out our power grids.

That's why we're building a telescope

on top of a mountain in Hawaii

called DKIST, so we can look at the sun in incredible detail.

We're building the first spacecraft

that can fly to the sun, Solar Probe Plus.

So we have to understand the sun far better than we do

because we don't want to be surprised

by one of these events again.

We will have another Carrington event.

We just don't know when.

The astrophysics clock is ticking.

We're building the world's largest solar telescope

so we can actually make predictions about what the sun will do.

This is beyond just exploration.

This is actually designed to protect the Earth.

We're at 10,000ft here and this round structure

that we have in the back is the entrance aperture.

We have a requirement to be centring that hole

on the sun within 70mm.

MOUNTAIN: We've been observing the sun for millennia.

For a lot of our history as a species

the sun has always been the symbol of perfection

that drove the entire human existence.

In ancient African, Egyptian, Chinese,

Roman, Greek, Hindu mythologies,

we've had gods to explain the sun's presence.

In the late stone age, humans built

great temples to track the motions of the sun.

Places like Stonehenge in England and Newgrange in Ireland.

MURTAGH: At Newgrange, during the winter solstice,

the sun would shine through that chamber and through that tunnel,

light up the chamber and bring the souls of the dead to heaven.

Modern solar science really started

with the development of the telescope.

You know, prior to Galileo turning his small telescope to the skies,

we thought that the sun was this perfect orb, and it's not.

In 1611, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei

discovered a way to observe the bright surface of the sun

by projecting it onto a piece of paper with his home-made telescope.

To his surprise, he saw that the sun was not perfect.

Dark spots were scattered across its surface.

He drew these spots day after day,

and seeing that they were moving, created the first flip book movie.

It showed not only that the sun was imperfect

but it was also rotating.

The origin and nature of sunspots would remain a mystery for 300 years,

and drawing and tracking them

would become a passion for astronomers around the world.

In fact, Richard Carrington was drawing a massive sunspot group

on that very day in 1859

when he saw the mysterious bright flash coming from the sun.

And it wasn't until 1912 that we began to understand

what these sunspots are

when George Ellery Hale built this enormous solar telescope

on Mount Wilson in Los Angeles

where he could look at the sun in incredible detail,

into the heart of the sunspots.

Hale's telescope funnels the sunlight down a 150-foot tower

into an observing room where he could see the sun in detail.

Sunspots are still drawn there to this day.

Then when Hale passed the light from a sunspot

through the spectrograph, it measured the magnetic field

for the very first time inside the sun spot.

And that was the realisation that the sun had magnetic field

and the sunspots were the heart of these magnetic fields.

So the sun's a star, of course,

and its core has a nuclear furnace,

which kinda gives way to what we call the radiative zone.

And the radiative zone is this kinda loosey-goosey place

where there's a lot of hydrogen and helium mixed and photons.

As you get out into the outer half of the solar interior,

we come across this place called the convection zone,

and it's really like a big pot of soup.

And that is the place where the sun's magnetic field is generated.

Sometimes the magnetic field becomes very unstable

and it pops through the surface and makes what we call sunspots.

These sunspots turn black because these magnetic fields

restrain the bubbling, boiling convection

creating a slightly cooler region than the surrounding,

bright 6,000-degree sun.

And if you look at these images of the sun

in extreme ultraviolet light,

you can actually see that the hot atmosphere of the sun

is being held in place by the strong

magnetic fields that are coming from those sunspots.

It almost looks like a neon sign.

But instead of a glass tube holding this hot gas in place,

there's actually a strong magnetic field there.

You see these incredible structures and beautiful tendrils,

like the whole sunspot is alive.

And then you realise the sunspot itself

is vastly bigger than the Earth.

Unfortunately, what can happen from time to time

is as a large sunspot emerges,

it places these larger and larger ropes

of magnetic field into the atmosphere

and it injects more and more energy into those magnetic ropes.

It twists them like twisting a spring.

It just gets a stronger and stronger magnetic field

with more and more energy pent-up into it.

It's like you've been compressing a spring, trying to push it.

Suddenly it pops up,

and that magnetic energy that was pent up there

takes that material from the atmosphere and shoots it out.

And that then becomes the coronal mass ejection

with it's high-speed magnetic field that can impact Earth.

With the coronal mass ejection,

literally, it's a mass of coronal material ejected very fast.

Very high-energy particles

probably coming at about two million miles an hour.

They are the nasty guys, and they have enough mass that they can smash

into our planet causing another Carrington-level event.

Such an event would do untold damage to our infrastructure.

So understanding the sunspots is why we're building the DKIST telescope.

What we're trying to do is to measure magnetic fields

inside these sunspots

so we can actually predict when a Carrington event comes

with enough time for us to do something about it.

And to do that, we need incredibly high resolution.

RIMMELE: So here on Maui, 10,000ft above sea level

on top of Haleakala, which in Hawaii means the house of the sun,

and it really is a perfect sight for solar observing.

Going up high gets us way above much of the atmospheric turbulence,

so blurring of the images is very low.

We also have technology called adaptive optics

that the military developed to look at spy satellites.

And it can correct, in real time, the distortions of the light

coming through the atmosphere over a thousand times a second.

And for the first time, we're able to bring together that technology

with the ability to make a really big mirror.

One of the main components is the four-metre mirror

that collects the light, the formula magnifying glass, if you will.

But when we point a four-metre telescope at the sun

and then focus that into a focal point,

it would melt steel, it would melt copper within seconds.

So we have to be very careful with this device

and we have to actually cool it.

And with that a massive four-metre telescope

on an incredible site like Haleakala

combined with adaptive optics, we were able to look

with unprecedented detail into the heart of sunspots.

The DKI solar telescope will allow us to see the sun as never before.

But there are some things that can only be seen when the sun goes dark.

It was the most amazing thing I've ever experienced.

I was on a boat, and we looked at the ocean

and we could see the shadow as it was coming towards us very fast.

McINTOSH: We were sitting on a beach waiting for the clouds to clear off,

the wind patterns start to change,

animals start to change.

Everything just goes quiet.

And then all of a sudden, it hits.

MAN 1: Oh, wow!

(CROWD GASPING)

Oh, my God. Oh, my.

During a total solar eclipse, it's a very weird experience

when the sun literally disappears.

For me, it was sort of a religious experience.

A total solar eclipse is what happens

when the moon blocks out the light from the sun.

It's as simple as that.

For thousands of years of eclipses,

we saw it, but we didn't really understand.

In 1925, there was a total solar eclipse

that was visible from New York City,

and they sent a naval aircraft up

to provide the first movie of a total solar eclipse.

Eclipses were the only time you could see the sun's corona,

the sun's enigmatic cloud that surrounds it.

And they filmed for the very first time a movie of that corona,

which is extremely important for understanding

solar physics and space weather.

It was a very special time in history.

When the disc of the moon blocks the light of the sun,

the naked eye can see

the sun's mysterious atmosphere known as the corona.

The corona reveals that in addition to light,

the sun also radiates

electrically-charged particles called the solar wind.

FOX: The corona really hides two fundamental mysteries from us.

One, that it's actually hotter than the surface of the sun.

The surface of the sun is at about 6,000 degrees.

But that corona is up at a few million degrees.

That just shouldn't happen.

If you have a bonfire, you put your hand close to the fire, it gets hot.

As you move away, it gets cooler.

That's not the same with the sun.

And the second mystery, why in that region

does this solar material suddenly get accelerated

and form what we call the solar wind.

Solar wind is constant emissions from the sun that sweep out

continuously across the solar system

and generally made up of magnetic field

and particles, protons and electrons.

All of our solar system, and especially Earth,

are constantly buffeted by this solar wind.

And changes in the speed of the wind or it's pressure

can actually have big consequences on Earth.

And if you wanna understand how the solar atmosphere

is heated to its high temperature, or if you wanna understand

how the wind is accelerated at very high speeds,

there are a few basic things that we need to measure directly.

We've tried for nearly half a century in the space age

to solve these two physics problems.

But all of our models, all of our theories have failed

to be able to tell us exactly why these two mysteries happen.

We've successfully put a man on the moon, and that was hard.

That was really hard. And yet, we haven't been able

to fly a spacecraft really close to the sun to answer those questions.

It is just so much harder.

We're just starting to scratch the surface

of observing the sun directly.

We've had a number of very interesting missions,

but all of these are at a distance.

For the first time in 2018, we're gonna send a mission,

Solar Probe Plus, to go very close to the sun.

It's taken a lot of technology, a lot of advancements,

to be able to make sure that a Solar Probe

would be able to go and survive and work in that environment.

Extreme heat, crushing gravity, and massive radiation

means that sending a probe to the sun

is one of the greatest challenges NASA has ever faced.

It would be the harshest environment a spacecraft has ever encountered.

Solar Probe starts her journey on a Delta IV Heavy,

which is our largest lift capacity rocket.

They have to survive launch.

The instantaneous acceleration the spacecraft will experience

is something like 300 times gravity.

After the rocket gets up into orbit,

it's gonna be a very busy first couple of months for Solar Probe.

Six weeks after launch, she will encounter Venus for the first time,

and we're gonna do gravity assists

to get us into the orbit that we want to get into.

She'll encounter Venus another six times

to gradually make her come closer and closer to the sun,

so we kinda walk her orbit in until we're just a little shy

of four million miles above the solar surface.

Radiation doses are extremely high.

The sun will be more than 400 times brighter

than we're used to seeing it.

We have to absorb so much light that it could actually flip

the spacecraft around if we aren't actively compensating for it.

The front of the spacecraft will get up to

temperatures of around 1,600 degrees Celsius.

So it'll actually be visibly glowing, it's so hot.

There aren't even US standards on how to measure

material properties at those elevated temperatures.

This huge heat shield is reflecting and absorbing all of that heat

such that the instruments on the body of the spacecraft

are operating at about room temperature.

Solar Probe will become the fastest object ever made.

The closest approach to the sun's gravity accelerates us

and so we're gonna be moving at a couple million miles an hour.

Solar Probe is going to a region that no-one's been to before,

just outside of the very outer edges of the corona.

We will be able to get into that area

where these coronal mass ejections form.

Once we know the basic physics underneath that,

that'll help us better predict whether or not an event

is going to be disruptive on Earth.

Right now the team is very focused on the beginning of Solar Probe,

getting everything together, getting her on the rocket

and getting her up into orbit.

I don't think any of us really want to think about the end.

After the final fly-by of Venus,

we can continue for certainly a fair few orbits.

Unfortunately, at some point, we will run out of fuel.

At that point, the spacecraft will start to rotate around,

and the sun will hit the areas of the spacecraft

that are not designed to see the sun,

and, unfortunately, at that point, that will be the end of Solar Probe.

She will be destroyed.

You just hope that you've anticipated every surprise.

Of course, it wouldn't be a mission of exploration

if we knew what we were gonna see.

Solar Probe Plus will reveal our stars

that could never be seen from the ground.

It may finally solve the mysteries of the corona...

..and it will help us understand what happens when the solar wind

reaches the Earth, our fragile home.

FOX: The aurora has sparked so many legends and myths.

The Eskimos used to think it was a sign of their loved ones

coming down to visit them, playing in the sky.

The Chinese candle dragon is named for the aurora.

The Vikings thought it was a bridge to Valhalla.

The first aurora records were from about 4,000 years ago.

People thought that aurora portended births or deaths of emperors.

These are beautiful glimmering lights in the northern sky.

In fact, quite recently, Reykjavik turned off all their lights

so their citizens could just see

the effects of the sun on that night sky

as the magnetic particles funnel down onto the Earth.

When the electrically-charged particles of the solar wind

hit the Earth's magnetic field, they are funnelled towards the poles,

where they interact with the upper atmosphere

causing it to shimmer and glow.

This is the display we call the aurora borealis,

the northern lights.

The aurora borealis is an indicator of the intensity of the solar wind.

Normally, that wind is like a steady breeze,

but sometimes, it can be a storm

or, in the case of a Carrington event, a hurricane.

Understanding this space weather is essential to the survival

of our technologically-advanced civilisation.

The first space weather forecasts were broadcast

from the Eiffel Tower back in 1928.

At that point, we knew that our radio communication

was affected by disturbances coming from the sun.

Space base measurements in the 1950s

beginning with the start of the space age

and our ground-based measurements finally gave us the ability

to measure somewhat comprehensibly

this entire chain between the sun and the Earth.

Technology is vulnerable to these disturbances in space

and understanding that vulnerability and being able to prepare for it,

it's the mission of the space weather prediction centre.

Here's three days of the solar X-ray backgrounds.

You can see we had a C-class flare two days ago,

but since then, solar activity's been very quiet.

Again, not a lot of threat from the current regions on the solar disc.

Right now we're outside a three-day window to issue watches,

but we'll be keeping an eye on that feature as it moves into position.

The Space Weather Prediction Centre is where the nation's alerts

warnings and information about space weather are determined

and have disseminated throughout the nation and around the world.

Often times, space weather's compared

to where terrestrial meteorology was

in the early 1900s with a handful of observation points.

It's a lot like forecasting hurricanes with a report

that winds are shifting a few hundred miles away

by only having a few observation points

versus today having real-time data from multiple model indications.

We do have growing access

to comprehensive ground-based and space-based data

that we are just now starting to develop the ability

to incorporate it more effectively in our numerical models

from the sun to the Earth, and that advance will,

in my opinion, take us to the next level

in accurate space weather services.

We understand that the sun does have

these additional emissions, if you will.

Not just the heat and the light, but the emissions associated

with solar flares and coronal mass ejections.

These emissions from the sun can cause big, big problems

to the technology here on Earth and in space.

In the past, space weather events have lead to near-dire consequences.

One was, in fact, during the Cold War

in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis

when one of our U2 pilots ended up in Russian airspace.

What caused the confusion was the aurora borealis.

The pilot was relying on the night sky and stars

to understand which way he was going and could not see the stars

with the brilliant aurora borealis that was occurring.

And ended up in Russian airspace at a very, very bad time

when any action by either side could've triggered nuclear war.

Several years later, May 1967,

there's a large sunspot observed,

sure enough what produced a big flare at the wrong time.

All of a sudden, radar systems that we rely on

for national defence were jammed.

This was not a good thing.

In response, we had to dispatch

nuclear strike capability of aircraft.

But within minutes, space weather forecast just monitoring the sun

were able to advise the decision makers, "Hey, heads up.

Big, big solar flare occurred,

likely the cause of the jamming of our national defence systems."

We realised then just how critical it was that we get this information

in the right hands at the right time.

With every year that passes,

our infrastructure's becoming more and more sensitive

to an event like this.

We're more dependent on technology.

We run our power grids closer and closer to the maximum amount

of power that they can deliver.

So we really need to address this.

In terms of forecasting space weather,

it's an incredibly difficult process.

It's not like terrestrial meteorology

where we have thousands of satellites that encompass the Earth

where we can actually see weather systems

forming thousands of miles away.

Earth's weather and space weather, this conceptual gap of 60 years,

which is pretty much the age of the space age, right?

Their ability to see the global Earth's weather system

lead to vast advances

and predictability of the Earth's weather.

We need the same thing for the sun.

In the vastness of interplanetary space,

we only have a handful of satellites monitoring the sun.

Among them are the Solar Dynamics Observatory,

which views our star in multiple wavelengths of light

corresponding to different temperatures.

Stereo A and B, complimentary spacecraft,

which provide us with a 360 degree view of the sun's surface...

..and the solar and heliospheric observatory,

which blocks the disc of the sun, making an artificial eclipse

which allows us to observe the corona and detect coronal mass ejections.

But these satellites leave a considerable gap in our knowledge

of coronal mass ejections, how they form,

their magnetic properties and the direction they're headed.

The thing that really gives you the mega-punch

when one of these things erupts, it's like a tumbleweed.

The problem is this is a big, hot, magnetic intergalactic tumbleweed.

And we don't know from when that thing leaves the sun

how it evolves at all until it gets to the Earth.

The sun is constantly producing coronal mass ejections...

..but they're thrown out in all directions.

And because the sun is so far away and the Earth is such a small target,

we rarely suffer a serious impact.

But if the Earth is in the right place at the wrong time,

there could be devastating consequences.

Back in 1859, Richard Carrington saw one of those events

that went off towards us,

and that coronal mass ejection slammed into our magnetic field

and actually produced the effects that we saw.

If that happened today, it would be devastating if we weren't ready.

One of the biggest indicators of whether you'll have

a major disturbance at Earth is just

which way the magnetic field is pointed

inside that eruption when it gets to Earth.

We have a lot of images of eruptions,

but we don't necessarily have a good way

of figuring out when their magnetic field is

and which way the magnetic field is oriented.

The Earth has a magnetic field. It's like this bar magnet.

You know, north is at the top, south is at the bottom.

The problem with the sun is it has a very chaotic magnetic field,

and when it throws off one of these mass events,

it's orientation matters too.

So you have this thing flying through space,

but if the orientations are like this, what happens?

It just passes straight by.

The problem comes when you turn the magnetic field around.

As it comes towards us, chaos.

Suddenly all those electrically charged particles from the sun

generate a huge electrical surge down the Earth's magnetic field

which has to go somewhere.

And, of course, we've covered the Earth with all kinds of wires,

our electrical grids.

And so that's where this massive electrical surge is going to go,

right into our power grids.

When the currents flow in the power grid,

you could categorise the threat in two different ways.

One, it can trip out critical systems

causing us significant problems on the electric power grid.

The second piece is transformer damage.

These transformers are very big and should they be damaged,

that presents a whole new challenge because these big transformers

are not sitting on a shelf out back to be replaced.

They're often tailor-made, it takes time to make 'em,

and it could result in a long-term outage measured in weeks and months.

When the Carrington event happened and those transmission lines

for the telegraph got hit by those electrical currents

and burst into flames,

that's nothing compared to what would happen

in a big solar event to the power grids.

Should a Carrington-level event happen again,

the current estimates are that it would cost the US alone

about three trillion dollars and that the eastern seaboard

could be without power for a year.

GPS navigation can get knocked out,

spacecraft can get radiation doses,

polar airline flights can be disrupted.

We're looking at communication systems failing,

financial systems coming to a screeching halt.

The impacts would be major for the economy.

It's the same thing that's gonna happen

when the power goes out from a hurricane.

It's the same that's gonna happen with a geo-magnetic storm.

The lights go out, what do you do now?

Hurricane Sandy, you had a population

of 25 million people without power.

But what if it was the entire region?

Not just New York to Boston quarter,

but now you add in Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis.

There's very few natural hazards outside of geomagnetic storms

that even produce that wide of an impact.

It could start on the east coast and go all the way to the west coast.

It could start in Europe and reach our east coast.

You know, it could be the whole planet that goes dark.

It would really be a pretty major event for humanity.

Major storms from the sun actually hit the earth's atmosphere

roughly once a decade.

Nothing of the scale of the Carrington flares

happened since 1859.

Statistically, it is predicted that a large-scale coronal mass ejection

could hit the Earth once every hundred years.

This means we are due for one any time now.

The government has realised

just how vulnerable our technological civilisation is.

And so president Obama signed an executive order

to engage government agencies in building a master plan

for mitigation strategies for space weather events.

We need to focus on low probability,

high-consequence geomagnetic storms.

If you know when you have a plan, then hopefully the power

will only be out for hours to days

because the system was warned,

took steps, protected itself,

and now we're talking about restarting the system

versus having to rebuild the system.

Today, we have virtually no warning in the event of a major solar storm.

But the understanding gained through observations

from the DKI solar telescope and Solar Probe Plus

could give us the lead time we need to be safe.

With enough warning, we can shut down our electrical grids,

power down our satellites, ground our flights,

and protect ourselves from a powerful solar storm.

On my space flight, I've had the real privilege

of being able to go service and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

And the Hubble Space Telescope is really our starship

that allows us to transport ourselves to distant galaxies,

which are, of course, just collections of billions of stars.

And they come in all sizes and colours.

Our Sun is kind of a puny star in celestial standards.

But that's very fortunate for us

because the really big rock star Suns have very short lifetimes

and often end their lives in spectacular supernova explosions.

We look into the heart of Orion with the Hubble,

you can see stars being created.

If you look further out, you can see these beautiful nebulae

called the helix nebulae or the cat's eye nebulae.

These are beautiful structures, wonderful images.

However, that's the end point of our sun.

That's our sun dying.

So we know what's going to happen.

Today our Sun is a middle-aged star.

It has enough hydrogen left

to continue to burn for another five billion years.

Once it runs out of that hydrogen,

the pressure that the sun generates in its core is gonna give up.

As the core of the star collapses, the outer layers of the sun

will expand into space.

That's what we call a red giant star.

When the sun is a red giant, it'll be about 200 times bigger

than it is today and a thousand times more luminous.

So it'll scorch the inner planets

and then the sun is gonna cool and fade over time

and that's what we call a white dwarf star.

We know that a low-mass star like the sun

is gonna suffer that eventual end fate.

A time will come when we'll need to find another planet to call home;

an Earth 2.0.

Until recently, we could only wonder

if there were other planets out there among the stars.

But now we know.

Our space telescopes have shown that virtually every star in the sky

has at least one planet revolving around it.

But developing the technology to take us to another potential home

is something we have yet to achieve.

If we're eventually gonna go to other stars,

we're gonna need to go much faster than we've ever gone before

and to do that, we're gonna need some kind of nuclear propulsion.

For the history of space flight,

we've been depending on chemical rockets.

And it's been very effective to go to the moon...

..to explore low Earth orbit.

We're just starting to use electric propulsion

to send our spacecraft out into deep space,

which provides very low thrust, but because it's electric,

you can thrust for a very long time.

The Dawn spacecraft has been exploring our asteroid belt

using this electric propulsion.

I believe the next generation of rocket will be a fusion rocket.

Fusion is the engine that powers the sun,

combining hydrogen into helium and releasing energy.

It's something that we've been working on for decades here on Earth

to provide clean fusion power for electricity.

And so when we build a fusion rocket

and send people out eventually to another star,

our Sun, which has provided us this nice environment on Earth,

the warmth, the sunlight, the light for plants to grown,

will have given us the key to leave this paradise

and try and find that Earth 2.0.

Our star will one day fade away.

But understanding its inner workings may help us to escape the same fate.

We're now entering into this golden age of solar observations.

Combining ground-based observations with space-based observations

provides us a full picture of the entire solar atmosphere.

For the Solar Probe team,

we're finally gonna go on this voyage.

By the time we launch, it will have been 60 years

since the first time this mission was actually called for.

It's just so exciting to think we're gonna send a probe

into the sun's atmosphere for the first time.

This is a physics problem has been around for half a millennium,

and we're potentially poised to answer it.

That's what being a modern species is,

beginning to understand our universe,

beginning to understand how the world works,

how the universe works.

It's a good reason to get up in the morning, to actually look out

and say, "We can make a difference by observing.

We can make the world just a little bit more predictable

and maybe through that

we can harness a power we haven't really understood

and that will give us the ability to leave this solar system

before our sun burns out."

We are on the verge of understanding the mysteries of the sun,

and doing so may give us the power to one day embark upon

humanity's next great journey,

our journey to the stars.

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